from the open-it-all-up dept

Craig Mod has a fascinating article for Aeon, talking about the unfortunate stagnation in digital books. He spent years reading books almost exclusively in ebook form, but has gradually moved back to physical books, and the article is a long and detailed exploration into the limits of ebooks today -- nearly all of which are not due to actual limitations of the medium, but deliberate choices by the platform providers (mainly Amazon, obviously) to create closed, limited, DRM-laden platforms for ebooks.

When new platform innovations come along, the standard progression is that they take the old thing -- whatever it is they're "replacing" -- and create a new version of it in the new media. Early TV was just radio plays where you could see the people, for example. The true innovation starts to show up when people realize that you can do something new with the new media that simply wasn't possible before. But, with ebooks, it seems like we've never really reached that stage. It's just replicated books... and that's it. The innovations on top of that are fairly small. Yes, you can suddenly get any book you want, from just about anywhere and start reading it almost immediately. And, yes, you can take notes that are backed up. Those are nice. But it still just feels like a book moved from paper to digital. It takes almost no advantage of both the ability to expand and change the canvas, or the fact that you're now a part of a world-connected network where information can be shared.

While I don't think (as some have argued) that Amazon has some sort of dangerous "monopoly" on ebooks, Mod is correct that there's been very little pressure on Amazon to continue to innovate and improve the platform. And, he argues (quite reasonably), if Amazon were to open up its platform and let others innovate on top of it, the whole thing could become much more valuable:

It seems as though Amazon has been disincentivised to stake out bold explorations by effectively winning a monopoly (deservedly, in many ways) on the market. And worse still, the digital book ‘stack’ – the collection of technology upon which our digital book ecosystems are built – is mostly closed, keeping external innovators away.

To understand how the closed nature of digital book ecosystems hurts designers and readers, it’s useful to look at how the open nature of print ecosystems stimulates us. ‘Open’ means that publishers and designers are bound to no single option at most steps of the production process. Nobody owns any single piece of a ‘book’. For example, a basic physical book stack might include TextEdit for writing; InDesign for layout; OpenType for fonts; the printers; the paper‑makers; the distribution centres; and, finally, the bookstores that stock and sell the hardcopy books.

And, on top of this, people creating "ebooks" are limited to the options given to them by Amazon and Apple and Google. And then it all gets locked down:

Designers working within this closed ecosystem are, most critically, limited in typographic and layout options. Amazon and Apple are the paper‑makers, the typographers, the printers, the binders and the distributors: if they don’t make a style of paper you like, too bad. The boundaries of digital book design are beholden to their whim.

The fact that all of these platforms rely on DRM -- often at the demands of short-sighted publishers -- only makes the problem worse:

The potential power of digital is that it can take the ponderous and isolated nature of physical things and make them light and movable. Physical things are difficult to copy at scale, while digital things in open environments can replicate effortlessly. Physical is largely immutable, digital can be malleable. Physical is isolated, digital is networked. This is where digital rights management (DRM) – a closed, proprietary layer of many digital reading stacks – hurts books most and undermines almost all that latent value proposition in digital. It artificially imposes the heaviness and isolation of physical books on their digital counterparts, which should be loose, networked objects. DRM constraints over our rights as readers make it feel like we’re renting our digital books, not owning them.

If ebook platforms and technology were more open, it's quite conceivable that we'd be experiencing a different kind of ebook revolution right now. People could be much more creative in taking the best of what books provide and leveraging the best of what a giant, connected digital network provides -- creating wonderful new works of powerful art that go beyond the standard paper book. But we don't have that. We have a few different walled gardens, locked tight, and a weak recreation of the paper book in digital form.

It's difficult to mourn for lost culture that we never actually had, but it's not difficult to recognize that we've probably lost a tremendous amount of culture and creativity by not allowing such things to thrive.

from the ridiculous dept

We've always had our concerns about the ridiculous DMCA "exemptions" process concerning circumvention of digital locks. If you don't know, the DMCA has a strict anti-circumvention rule that says breaking digital locks, such as DRM, is itself a violation of copyright law, even if the purpose of the lock-breaking does not infringe on anyone's copyright. As a sort of "pressure valve" every three years, people can "apply" to the Librarian of Congress for exemptions to that rule. This, of course, is completely ridiculous and backwards. We need to apply, once every three years, to use legally purchased products the way we want to without it being considered illegal? That's crazy. But it's the way things are set up, and it can lead to some bizarre scenarios. As we explained last year when the latest round of exemptions was announced, the Librarian of Congress took awaythe exemption for unlocking your phone... but provided a 90 day window.

That window ends on Sunday. In other words, unlocking your phone on Saturday: legal. Unlocking your phone on Sunday: you probably just broke the law. As the EFF properly notes, this is not what copyright law is supposed to be about:

"Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide."

I don't even think there's anything "arguable" about it. Copyright law has no business being involved in deciding whether or not my phone can be unlocked. It's silly that this is an issue. It's silly that there needed to be an exemption in the first place. And it's silly that this exemption is being taken away. It's for things like this that people lose respect for copyright law.

from the killing-DRM dept

In most areas of entertainment, DRM is an option. If you want to publish an ebook, you don't have to use DRM. Same for video games and music. While these others areas of entertainment are moving away from DRM, there is one prominent holdout on the DRM front: movies. Every official distribution and streaming service for the movie industry has some form of required DRM. This includes streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, download services like Amazon and iTunes, and even the physical media such as DVD and Blu-ray. According to the larger studios, DRM is a necessity, even though its effectiveness is questionable at best and customers hate it. But what about those studios that want to deliver a High Definition experience without the burden of DRM? What choices do they have? If all they want to do is allow people to stream or download the movie, they have plenty of options, but what if they want to include the full feature list available via Blu-ray?

This is one quandary that Terry Hancock of Free Software Magazine found himself facing a little over a year ago. He had been working on two films and wanted a High Definition feature rich experience without the hassle of Blu-ray DRM. He had looked at multiple options, many of which fell a little flat in the end. However, one stood out as the most reasonable option for what he wanted to do. He had to write his own open, DRM-free, HD video standard.

This may sound like a quixotic goal for a lone individual without corporate backing to develop, but most of the money spent on developing Blu-Ray was spent on the DRM technology -- meaning the technology to make it not play under certain circumstances. The actual business of getting menus and video to work is much simpler, and a lot of the work has already been done. So a format without DRM, based on open standards is intrinsically more attainable.

Think about that. Designing DRM is designing ways in which your movie will not play. Why would anyone want to waste time and money on such an idiotic goal? You would think that movie producers would want people to watch their movies. This idea is what pushed Terry to this point. Why waste time and money on using a DRM'ed media like Blu-ray to release what he wants to be a free culture movie? Even if he tried to work around the DRM of Blu-ray, there is no guarantee that the movies would play in standard Blu-ray players and he would still have to deal with licensing issues.

Terry has not set himself up for disappointment with this standard. He recognizes that it will not unseat Blu-ray as the mass market standard but rather is looking at this for use as a promotional format for those who want to distribute physical media. His examples include using the standard for films as Kickstarter rewards or to distribute films at conventions. There are a lot of opportunities for this to be successful in the indie scene.

On top of this, Terry plans to make the standard completely open and open source. While he does not have an open source web destination yet, he plans to have one ready soon. This choice is probably the key to gaining a more wide spread adoption. If he had tried to keep it locked up in the same way as Blu-ray or DVD, it would never take off.

I applaud the effort Terry is putting into this project. However, it is frustrating that such a project needs to exist. The insistence of the movie studios that all distribution of their films be burdened with DRM is not only ineffective, but it is also harming indie artists who would love to access the features without the restrictions and massive licensing fees. Hopefully, this project will succeed and give those artists the control (or lack of control) they want over their work.